San Francisco treat... or trick?

The trip started out to a rough beginning. As I awoke and began packing, the space bags I purchased the day before all broke. I gave up on that and went to move the car to pack Joe's stuff in it. It had problems staying started. After an hour I finally discovered and fixed the problem. It was idling to low. I attempted to get on the laptop before I began packing to look up something and it would not come on. The power adapter in the computer was disconnected on the inside, so I fixed that. At this point it was already 11 Am and we were supposed to leave a 9. So we pulled my infamous pack and go at this point and just shoved everything in the car by importance and ended up leaving around 2.
The drive started of great however there are not that many pics up to this point cause Alabama and especially Louisiana are the scraggliest states ever. We had plans to stay in New Orleans but little did we know the madness that was that city. We expected to see a very personal and unique city however it was just the opposite. Imagine Baltimore but less crowded and even more run down. We knew it would be bad with the recent hardships here but this was like something out of a third world country. As we drove down canal to the french quarter a couple times people approached the car and we were worried about what would happen if they actually got to the car. And the french quarter was way disappointing, nothing but souvenir shops, fast food place and one big casino. We didn't feel safe trying to stay the night here considering and drove another couple hours to baton rouge were we passed out at an overpriced best western.